OK, a little refinement. The first few times I used them I got great results, but then started getting errors... I made a little bracket to hold the Eye-One in place at the right height, and it's been 100% good readings since. That is shown at the bottom of the post.

OK, a little refinement. The first few times I used them I got great results, but then started getting errors... I made a little bracket to hold the Eye-One in place at the right height, and it's been 100% good readings since. That is shown at the bottom of the post.

OK, finally had a chance to run the CMYK targets on the Rimage printers and it's rock-solid. They are thermal "ribbon" printers and the drivers seem to be set up to work with RGB files, so I wasn't sure if it was worth it, but if you make a simple sRGB > CMYK (US Web coated SWOP), then send it using the CMYK profiles the result is a much tighter grayscale, more subtle tonal gradations... stuff like that.

I don't have one of the Epson desktop inkjets to try, but in a few weeks I'll be trying the RGB targets out on an Epson.

OK, here's a little update. Last night I profiled a client's Epson 3000... a kind of cute, but mildly annoying printer, especially for printing CDs and fine art paper, what with the dumb and needlessly repetitive loading procedures.

As you probably know if you have one of these, you print to disks using the "Epson Print CD" utility, which is astoundingly basic. I have no idea what, if anything, it's doing with color management, but I couldn't find any color controls to shut off or anything else for that matter. I printed a test target unprofiled, and the good news is that it didn't do too badly right out of the box.

I built a profile using the RGB targets, straight through the EPCD utility, then took my test chart and opened it in Photoshop. I then did a "Convert to Profile" and saved it with the embedded profile. It printed through EPCD with slightly better rendering of the reds and oranges, but there wasn't a significant difference.

There are four settings, basically high and low quality for PK and MK inks, and I didn't have time to try out all four...

Anyway, bottom line, it was a slight improvement, but maybe not worth the effort for most photographic printing. We've seen on the thermal printers, though, that the profiles make a big difference when there's a gradient color, so maybe this would help the inkjets there, too... I'd love to hear some reports if you give it a try since I don't have one of these printers on hand.